Out of curiousity more than anything, I tried Bi-Amping my 80's today. Now I know some of you are going to call this "passive bi-amping" or "fools bi-amping" or other names from the past, since I'm not truely using "Active Bi-Amping" and an electronic crossover before the amp and disabling the internal speaker crossovers.

I talked to Alan first and pretty much got the go ahead to give it a try. I wanted to make sure that there would be no issues to hooking up a seperate monoblock to the mids/highs and one to the woofer section. The 80's have a passive hi-level and low-level crossover design.

I will tell you that I did in fact notice a difference, for the better, in the overall bass and mid/high clarity, contrary to belief.

The main reason for this test was I wanted to see if there would be any difference in regards to the amp shutdown issue. I used the same song as in the above tests and specs, and everything else was the same in the setup.

I turned the volume up to the same levels of 100dB average from 12ft away to start, which was at 0 on the Denon main volume dial. I'm just using that as a reference as before.

Anyway, this time I was able to turn up the volume farther than before, however, the amp driving the Bass section did shut down. Before "fools bi-amping" the 80's would shut down on this particular song around +4. With bi-amping, I was able to get up around +8 and then the amp driving the woofer section shut down. Just to let you know, I was able to go further and the mid/highs amp never shut down.

When the woofer section shut down, I was not going over 110dB from 3ft in front of the speaker.

Whatever this tells us....

M80s VP180 4xM22ow 4xM3ic EP600 2xEP350
AnthemAVM60 Outlaw7700 EmoA500 Epson5040UB FluanceRT85